


Quiet Little Monsters

by Lexicon_V



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Nightmares, POV Cassian Andor, Rebelcaptain - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:48:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22658077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexicon_V/pseuds/Lexicon_V
Summary: He'd never had a nightmare about the future until her.
Relationships: Cassian Andor & Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 4
Kudos: 58





	Quiet Little Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Title and content inspiration from Brian Fallon's song "Little Nightmares." (Awesome song. Highly recommend.)

He felt like a voyeur, watching her sleep, trembling and unconscious. Practically shaking himself from the effort of holding back from wrapping his arms around her and telling her foolish things. That he would protect her. (She didn’t need his protection.) That they were safe. (They were never safe.) That he would always be there for her. (As if he could promise something like that.)

She jerked awake with a gasp and all but launched out of bed, looking around wildly.

“Jyn. We’re okay.” (That was true, at least.)

She sagged against the wall, still breathing fast, hands still shaking.

“We’re okay,” she repeated, quietly and mostly to herself.

He could see her armor start to slide back into place.

“Same as ever, right?” she said, weary and sarcastic. “Just my internal alarm clock telling me to get up at…” She glanced at the chrono. “03:33. Obviously. Wouldn’t want to get too comfortable.” One side of her mouth pulled into something between a sardonic smile and a grimace as she settled against the wall.

He exhaled in acknowledgment, a quiet humorless chuckle. They sat silently, side by side in the narrow bunk. She did not turn toward him for comfort and he didn’t offer any. He didn’t know what they were to each other or what to call this thing between them. Partners? Lovers? Just two haunted people who slept together, bled together, survived certain death together?

She tried to steady her breathing and he felt the air around them thick with unspoken things.

_I’m with you._

_I’m broken in the same way._

_I’m still breaking now._

_You’re the only one I trust to try and put me back together._

_I_ _won’t leave you. Not on purpose_

_Not unless they make me. Not unless they kill me._

He thought about how he used to have a lot of different nightmares. He rarely dreamed about the Empire specifically, but he often dreamed of being trapped. His unconscious mind twisted real threats into hazy monsters hanging on dream logic. He didn’t often remember the details, just the feeling of waking up desperate, sweaty, heart racing, adrenaline pumping through him and making it impossible to fall back to sleep until it ran its course and left him shivering, hollow, and exhausted.

He dreamed of his targets. In his waking life, Cassian told himself _it takes a monster to stop a monster._ It was a mantra as true to him as Chirrut’s prayers about the Force had been to the monk. He told himself, _if the abyss stares back, it will find an equal in me._ But his subconscious would not abide him. His ghosts came anyway.

He saw his relatives, friends, and comrades. Sometimes they would come gently and bring him comfort, but too often he relived their deaths, thrust back into the whatever helpless, hopeless situation had rendered him unable to save them in the first place. Forced to watch them die, over and over. Forced to hear them beg him for help, to ask why he always failed them.

In the immediate aftermath of Scarif his dreams had been flashbacks. Kay’s desperate voice, the sucking sound of the vault locking, the terrifying moment when Jyn pulled at the data cartridge and lurched backward and off balance. The heaviness of dragging his broken body up the data tower, the scorching smell of ozone in his nostrils, the ironic certainty that he would die in agony after finally finding a reason to live.

But in the months since then his worst dreams had settled around one specific subject: losing Jyn.

Sometimes he’d be back on Eadu, rain beating his back and running in his eyes, low in his sniper’s position aiming for her father, but through his scope he’d see her instead. Not skulking around the periphery of the platform as she had in actuality, but standing in her father’s place confronting the man in white. All the fire and rage in her eyes that he remembered. And in his nightmare, a phantom hand would lay across his own and together they’d pull the trigger.

A perfect shot to the head. As always.

He would wake in anguish before she hit the ground.

But the worst dreams were the ones where they lived together in an unfathomable time of peace, and she left anyway. He’d find himself in a house or apartment, knowing with the inexplicable certainty of a dream that it had been their home together and that she had left it. Because of him. His dream self knew he had shut her out, pushed her away. His dream self knew exactly how to fix it, but didn’t. His dream self stayed closed off and silent.

Just like his waking self.

He was used to nightmares about his past, flashbacks to his worst moments. Dreams that laid bare his failures as a soldier and a man. He knew how to calm himself, used grounding techniques he’d been taught years ago by Alliance shrinks who kept him “fit for duty” no matter what.

He’d never had a nightmare about the future until her. For all his platitudes about hope, he never actually had any for himself. He would die in this fight, alone or surrounded by enemies, and he’d be relieved to do so.

Of all the nightmares he’d ever had, this was the only one he could change.

He reached out and put an arm around her. She immediately curled into his side.

“In my worst dreams,” he says quietly into her hair (he can’t look at her face), “I lose you.”


End file.
